About

Welcome to my little slice of life, where I’ve enjoyed blogging about our family adventures, holidays and experiences at home and abroad. Often the best fun of all is that which can be experienced in one’s own back yard, and we are very fortunate to call Wellington, New Zealand our home.

I started writing this blog when my first child was born in 2003 (before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), wishing to keep a record of our lives and keep an online diary – of sorts – that family in the UK could easily check in on. Over the years it’s become a wonderful treasure chest to look back on and a way of keeping our adventures ‘alive’. Everyone has a story to tell and as a child I loved listening to older family members telling me stories from their youth. I write this blog for my children, my family and for me – to keep the memories alive. 

This blog also became really important to my mental health when my children were younger. I found that focusing on the positives at the end of each weekend helped me adjust to parenthood in a HUGE way. None of my three children were ‘sleepers’. I was sleep deprived for much of my thirties. I was constantly struggling to keep myself upbeat (when a cloud of depression kept hounding me). I survived on coffee, sunshine days, fresh air, naps and some medication prescribed from the doctor. I worked hard to not focus on the mess and chaos, but on all the magic moments of my children’s younger years (hence the name of this blog – ‘Catching the Magic’).

A little history…

My husband and I met way back in our University days, in 1992, in Southampton, UK.

A work opportunity gave us the chance to travel to New Zealand in 1996 and so began our love affair with the land of the long white cloud – ‘Aotearoa’. We kayaked the Abel Tasman, hiked the Milford Track, white water rafted, learned to ski and so much more (some posts about ‘the old days’ under ‘Blasts from the Past‘).

After an amazing experience we headed back to the UK, in 1998, enjoying a month travelling up the East coast of Australia. We had taken our relationship to another level in February of that year – when Dan asked me to marry him at the Marlborough Food and Wine Festival, on Valentine’s Day.

We were married on 29 May, 1999 and three months later… Dan was asked to return to New Zealand and take up the position of CIO for an electricity market company. It was really hard for me to leave my family after just a year living back in the UK, but this was an amazing opportunity for Dan and we still wanted to explore more of the southern hemisphere, so – with the blessing of our families – we headed off.

This time we became New Zealand residents and in the year 2000 we bought our first home, in Brooklyn, Wellington, New Zealand.

I found a job with a much loved organisation – the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-NZ), based in the beautiful Botanical Garden of Wellington.

In 2001 I became quite ill, with glandular fever, and then, in early 2002, I was diagnosed with depression. I left my job and worked on getting myself back to good health… which then led to my first pregnancy!

Our first child was born in the winter of 2003, with snow on the distant hills surrounding Wellington.

Two and a half years later our second daughter was born, just after Christmas, in 2005.

Our town house in Brooklyn started to feel small and impractical (with 20 steps to the front door and then another 10 or so to the living area) and so we began looking for a home on a flatter section (not easy in Wellington). In early spring, 2006, we moved into our current home, on the south coast of Wellington. We no longer had a view, but we had a flat section, a lovely home and garden, sheltered from the wind and a short walk to the beach. Perfect.

A year later Dan set up his own service management company, along with two friends, ‘You Do’. A spin off of that was ‘Beetil’ which came to the attention of US firm ‘Citrix’, who ended up buying Beetil in 2012.

In the midst of this our third daughter was born in February 2010 and completed our family.

Over the years life has thrown us some unexpected surprises (as it does). Our second born daughter didn’t settle into school well at all (at the age of 5, as is the norm in NZ – though legally children do not need to be enrolled in school until the age of 6).

We made the decision, at the end of 2011, to home educate her, and then continued to do so when we learned about us potentially moving to the USA as part of the sale of Beetil to Citrix.

In August 2013 we left our home in Wellington and flew to Santa Barbara, California, USA to live (check out the blog posts of our time there). Our children were aged 10, 7 and 3 at the time. We didn’t know how long we’d be there for. My husband had a 3 year work permit with Citrix. In the end, we stayed there for just over a year, returning to live back in our home, in Wellington, New Zealand, in October 2014. I home educated all three of my daughters during that time, as our attempt at school in the USA just didn’t work for us.

It was whilst living there that I started running regularly – and ran my first ever half marathon. After a few years of running half marathons I found confidence to run my first marathon in 2017, the Hawkes Bay Marathon, and first ‘Ultra marathon’ Tarawera Ultra Marathon, in February 2020, consisting of 52km on trails in beautiful Rotorua. If you enjoy reading about running events I’ve blogged about them in various posts under the heading ‘Running‘. I find running so important for my mental health (as well as physical well being) and simply love to be outdoors in nature.

Since returning to New Zealand our daughters each followed their own educational pathways. 

Our oldest child, Charlie, returned to the school they’d been at before we left for the USA and completed their education there in 2020. They enjoyed a gap year in 2021, when New Zealand’s borders were still closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, consisting of a couple of retail jobs and gaining experience in local theatres helping with sets and costumes, and in February 2022 commenced a degree in production design at VCA, University of Melbourne. They completed their degree in early 2025 and have been extremely busy in a range of arts projects (check out their website here). Now (2026) they are undertaking further education at VCA.

Our second born daughter, on our return from living in California, decided to try school in 2015 and enjoyed a year and a half at the same school as her older sister, but in 2016 decided to return to home education. Then, half way through 2020, she decided to enter high school in year 10 and loved it. She’s now in her third year at Victoria University Wellington, doing a double major in mathematics and computer science, as well as coaching children in gymnastics at a local gym, and doing maths tutoring. She loves to be active and plays tennis, runs (I have enjoyed a couple of events with her now!), surfs, snowboards, tumbles and does ‘free running’ and climbs (bouldering at a local place in Wellington).

Our youngest daughter, also went to school for a year on our return, but then enjoyed a care-free childhood of natural learning, surrounded by a great community of friends. She loved home education, with wonderful friends and weekly activities of STEM and drama classes, as well as the freedom to spend hours on digital art and animation. She followed her sister’s footsteps at the beginning of 2023, by going to high school and is thriving there.

Over the years we’ve been fortunate to have my parents visit once every two years and they’ve seen so much of New Zealand on their visits.

We’ve been back to the UK a few times and had some amazing stop overs on the way there and back, including Canada in Dec 2018, Japan in Jan 2019, San Francisco in 2007 and in 2012 we stopped in Santa Barbara and San Francisco on a trip to England. In more recent years I’ve been back on my own (Sept 2019 and Feb 2020, May 2018), to visit my parents (as my Mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in her early sixties and it became too hard for my Dad to travel with her). Sadly, my Mum passed away at the end of 2021. I travelled to the UK to be with her in her final months, the first blog post of that time is here. 

We’ve also enjoyed visiting parts of Australia (Byron Bay and the Gold Coast, as well as Sydney) with our children and have met up with my husband’s parents in Singapore for a holiday.

That’s some of our story, in a nutshell, so far!

Over the years I’ve met some wonderful people through this blog – even a few that have visited New Zealand, from the UK, and ended up emigrating! I’ve been inspired to write poetry from time to time, spurred on in 2011 by my oldest – who set a prompt every week for a year! I continued to write poetry in 2012 and in 2013 from New Zealand and California, and then gradually less poems over 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017-18. Interesting to note that as I started to run more, I wrote less (obviously running leaves me wordless!).

It’s now the start of 2026 and I didn’t write here last year. I ended up spending 5 months of 2025 in the UK, as my dear Dad was coming to the end of his life and passed away in July (sadly he was diagnosed with rapid onset Alzheimer’s disease in mid 2022, just six months after Mum passed away). I did keep notebooks and posted on Instagram. I am not sure whether to continue writing here or not, but the content is most likely to be more about running, interspersed with poems every now and again, and my dabbling with water colours.

If ever you are visiting Wellington then do say ‘Kia ora’. 

Thanks for stopping by,

Sarah x